you make my dreams
by thatssupersketch
Summary: The first time he sees the boy, it is as simple as a reassuring flash of green across a vast expanse of darkness of the yellow sky. It should not be something he remembers so vividly, but he does. This time, Todoroki does not fight sleep. / 5 times Todoroki sees a boy in his dreams, and 1 time he meets the boy of his dreams.


Todoroki does not dream often.

But when he does, there is usually some relevance to what he worries about—an upcoming test, an injury, his father. He can typically pinpoint where his discomfort stems from. Once he fixes the problem or resolves to ignore it, the dreams cease, and his sleep is blissfully dreamless once again.

When the dreams start and there is no clear antagonist or obstacle, Todoroki becomes perplexed. Not used to being blindsided by his own subconscious, he feels betrayed. He becomes frustrated at the lack of clarity—not only are the dreams incredibly vague, but he can't recognize any of the numerous others he is surrounded by.

The dreams begin like this: Todoroki is walking amongst a large crowd. He isn't necessarily comfortable, but there is no imminent threat of danger. But then the hairs prickle on the back of his neck and a growing sense of unease creeps in. It's unsettling, like a cold wind on a warm summer day. It feels out of place; eerie. There is an unspoken tang in the air. _A storm is coming_ , the trees seem to whisper. The people around him are mute. He can see their mouths moving, but all he can hear are the trees. Todoroki tries to drown them out, but their insistent murmurings soon become shouts that he can no longer ignore.

A ripple of terror pans out among the crowd. The atmosphere quickly changes. The crowd is no longer amicable, but unruly. Some shout while others disperse, turning the tides into a mass exodus. Todoroki can feel pressure against him as people push past in a futile attempt to get away. But from what, exactly?

With everyone at eye level and Todoroki still very much surrounded, he can never discern what or who the crowd is running from. The air begins to grow dark and heavy. He feels his steps drag, trying, _trying_ to push forward and find the cause of the alarm. But the crowd always surges, pushes him back, away from the unknown and back into limbo. He feels himself drowning, pulled down by the throng of people, unable to reach anyone or to call out. The deep blackness swallows him, and the last thing he sees is the yellow tint of the sky before being woken up in a panic, heart beating its way out of his chest, and sweat on his brow.

This is how Todoroki Shouto spends his nights for a good while. That is, until he appears.

(1)

The worst thing about the dreams is even though he knows what will happen, he can't stop himself from taking the exact same footsteps every time. His feet feel like lead, but he can't change their course. The air changes, the crowd panics. He rushes forwards, fated steps plodding on concrete. The motions are the same, but the electricity in the air feels different this time. Less yellow. Less of an impending storm. The catastrophe seems a bit farther off, rather than sitting on the edge of the abyss. Todoroki can feel the usual scenario is amiss, but his head is heavy as he tries to turn it over and over for answers. His head feels muddy. He feels as if a spell has been broken. He is not in full control; no, not yet. But he feels the pattern shift, even if only slightly.

He moves as if through syrup—slow, but concentrated effort does the trick. His vision is clouded, but he can make out something new. Against the pale yellow sky, there is an energy coming from something—someone—Todoroki can't make out. Whatever it is, it's crackling with electricity and he can feel the urgency of whatever is thrumming underneath the thin wiring of his subconscious. Even with this awareness, his limbs do not listen to his brain. Before he can focus his vision, he is yanked from his dream with a familiar sensation of falling. He wakes up, chest heaving, in his own bed.

The first time he sees the boy, it is as simple as a reassuring flash of green across a vast expanse of darkness of the yellow sky. It should not be something he remembers so vividly, but he does.

This time, Todoroki does not fight sleep.

(2)

The second time he sees the flash of green, he is able to distinguish a person. A boy.

The dream unfolds, just as before, but Todoroki begins to notice small differences that either not present or were too blurred for his dulled senses to recognize before. He gains a semblance of location awareness—in addition to perceiving the large crowd, the cobbled stones spread out in a web to form a sort of courtyard. He still can't decipher if he's been here outside of his dreams. The déjà vu is strong, but Todoroki _has_ been here hundreds of times before, even if only in his subconscious.

Faces begin to stand out in the crowd. It's as if Todoroki has been granted clarity, allowing him to focus in on the blur of his other escapades. An angry blonde boy, shoving at the crowd. A small brunette girl seems to float in and out of the weaving mass. A red haired boy, yelling, pushing. The array of senses that assault Todoroki begin to overwhelm him, but not even for a second would he wish the dulling of senses upon himself again.

The colors are brighter, the sickly yellow seeping from the sky into the courtyard. Todoroki knows he's imagining it, but the yellow feels like it is what is paralyzing the crowd and their inability to act. The darkness, too, feels darker. Todoroki both dreads and longs for inevitable. He feels himself step forwards, and dragged backward, as if through sea currents. _It's rougher,_ he thinks. _Do I get dragged deeper every time?_

 _Will I always wake up?_

Todoroki glances up to the sky through lidded eyes, unable to raise a hand to block the abscess of light pouring through. Only this time, it is not faceless figures surrounding him, growing larger with every falling inch.

Looking down at him from the expanse of the sky is a boy. He holds his hand out, desperation showing blatantly on his face. His hair is messy and the oddest shade of green, his face dusted with freckles like stars in the night sky. He's reaching, reaching for Todoroki.

Everything seems to move slower. Todoroki loses his clarity, and the boy drifts out of focus, until all that is left in his field of vision is a reassuring aura of green.

This is the first night Todoroki does not wake with the familiar ache in his chest.

(3)

Todoroki is getting tired of this. Correction: he has been tired of it for a very, very long time. He had merely resigned himself to his fate—but this seems to tear at him in places he never sought to protect. _Watch your head, watch your flank,_ his father would warn him during training. Not that Todoroki often took his father's advice to heart, but never had he suffered a severe injury that did not depend on protecting those two vital points in battle.

The old ache may be gone, but a new, forlorn one takes its place.

This was…new. An ache has spread through his chest, but the feeling is not one that he has felt before. Longing is the choice that Todoroki finally settles on. _One pain replaces another_ , he thinks grimly. _I'll never be free of this place._

He trudges through the steps he has made so many times before, willing it with all his might that this dream too will be different. Todoroki does not know what he wishes to be different. He does not know what will finally cause him to break free of this Groundhog Day. But he does know that he wants to see the boy in green again. Everything else in this dreamscape is hectic but him. He is the stabilizer that keeps Todoroki's heart from beating too erratically. He is Todoroki's one hope of helping him realize the underlying cause of his nightmares.

Some nights the dreams feel like they are stop motion and other nights they play on fast forward. The only thing he is certain of is his inability to act, to press, to fight. All except for that one time, but it has been so many lonely nights since then. He retained the ability to pick out faces, and knows those he is surrounded by as well as if they had been friends for years. The silence fills with the chatter around him. He learns the boy with the yellow hair likes to make puns and tease the girl who wears comically large earphones. He learns she likes to ignore him. These people, too, become a reassurance to Todoroki. The person he wants to see, however, remains noticeably absent.

He isn't sure how he feels about the awareness. Everything is louder, brighter. Every time the boy in green shows up, things change. He worries about the next change. He hopes there will be a next change. This limbo has been the longest yet, and the ache in Todoroki's chest grows deeper and deeper every passing dream. At some point, they became less of nightmares, and more of dreams.

Tonight, though, feels different. The hair stands up on the back of his neck like it did the first night he found himself in the courtyard. A change in the weather, a shuffle of the deck. There is the telltale changing of the sky, the oozing of the walls. People scatter. Todoroki surges forward, forward, then back. His fall feels light, as if something has caused him to float.

His descent feels different. Slower. Softer. He closes his eyes to block out the inpouring light, afraid to open his eyes, but he forces himself to do so.

There he stands, the boy in green. His hand is once again outstretched, reaching for Todoroki. The sheer earnestness in his face alone propels Todoroki forward in a way he had never found himself able to move in his dream before.

He grabs the boy's hand.

(4)

Todoroki no longer fears sleep.

The dreams continue to occur, but rather than rubbing him raw, they begin to soothe his aches and pains. They are comforting, familiar. Rather, the monotonous events no longer trouble him. His focus shifts from finding a way out to finding the boy with the green hair.

He shows up more often than not. Sometimes he is all but a dash of green in a sea of haze, but he's there, and that alone is enough to placate Todoroki's fears. The boy reminds him of a security blanket he had when he was young. His mother gave it to him and it soothed his particularly troubling nightmares. That is, until his father scorched the blanket.

Other days, the boy reaches Todoroki in time. He grabs his hand and lifts him from the improbable imploding hole in the cobblestone. His hands are firm and strong. He never says a word to Todoroki, but his smile is reassuring. As soon as Todoroki tries to speak, the spell is broken. He jolts awake, almost as if there is something preventing communication between the two.

It doesn't matter, asleep or awake, Todoroki's head is filled with green. He sees it everywhere he goes; the trees are green, the boy's sneakers are green, his pencil is green. It has become a constant in his life, the only reassuring presence. Whenever he finds himself agitated or anxious, he finds himself fixating on green.

Todoroki wonders about the correlation of colors and their effects on people.

(5)

The dreams are changing rapidly. Todoroki was used to small changes before there were large ones, but the entire fabric of the dream is changing. It's so very different than the first time he had this nightmare.

He's still stuck in a courtyard with a horde of other people; that much hasn't changed. But the sky never turns yellow. Todoroki shifts his glance from side to side. Nothing much is out of the ordinary within the crowd other than the usual undercurrent of fear is…gone.

With this, he feels a freedom he had not had in his dreams before. Hesitantly, he tests a footstep to the side. He stops.

 _I stopped?_

Todoroki's smile is ear splitting. He turns wildly about, trying to find what is so radically different tonight of all other nights. Then, a flash of green.

He locks eyes with the boy across the courtyard. His head is tilted to the side, his eyebrows raised. This is the first time he doesn't seem to be in a hurry. Actually, he seems to be taking his sweet time, parting the sea of a crowd as he approaches Todoroki. They scatter dutifully, but Todoroki doesn't care enough to watch where they go. His feet move of their own accord to meet his protector.

They meet in the middle of the now deserted courtyard. The sun beats down on them, a welcome change from the storm weather they had always experienced. The boy holds his palm up for Todoroki to take. It is rough and scarred, but it is good. No matter how clean his father's hands may have seemed to outsiders, they would never be good like this boy's hand was.

He gives him is hand. The boy's eyes crinkle as he smiles warmly at Todoroki, seemingly sunshine himself. _What a contradiction,_ thinks Todoroki. _Stars in the sky and sunshine, all at once._

He can stay quiet no longer, especially not when he can now speak. "Tell me your name," Todoroki asks, or rather, demands. His impatience has always gotten the best of him.

The boy smiles at him once again, but this time, it's bittersweet. Todoroki finds himself yanked unceremoniously out of his dream, feeling at a loss.

Todoroki chases sleep that night, but cannot find it.

(+ 1)

The nightmares stop.

After all that was said and done, all of Todoroki's nights were dreamless, much to his disdain. He longs to see the boy in green again; he longs to make sense of the whole ordeal. He still never figures out what was causing trauma in his subconscious, but he was almost certain he would be willing to dislodge it if it meant seeing the boy again.

Now, here he stands, before the gate of Yuuei. He spent his entire summer willing himself to dream again, and now he stands where every hero dreams to be. _Ironic,_ Todoroki thinks. _To be in the place of dreams, yet never to return to my own._

He follows the trickle of students into the courtyard, admiring the grandeur of the school. Grumpy as he may be, Todoroki could still appreciate fine architecture. As he looks up, gazing at the many banners of hero alumni, he bumps into someone. He whips around to find himself face to face with the green haired boy.

He is shorter than he remembered, standing a head shorted than Todoroki himself. His green hair is as messy and curly as he remembered, and there might have even been more freckles adorning the boy's face.

"You," he breathes, eyes wide. "It's you."

The green haired boy smiles sheepishly. "It's me."

"You're…real?"

He laughs, musical and genuine. It warms Todoroki's heart and the tips of his ears. "Yes, I'm real."

Todoroki is awestruck. He can't believe that the boy of his dreams—literally—stands in front of him. He reaches a hand out, as if to touch him, to prove he is real, but pulls back as he thinks better of it.

"You made it stop," he says softly. "Thank you."

The boy's eyes grow comically wide, "It's really no problem. I'm surprised you even recognize me, to be honest."

He cocks his head. "How could I not?"

Now it is the boy's turn to blush. "I-It's just—people don't usually remember…"

"A dream quirk, then?"

He nods his head enthusiastically. "Yes! I can join others' dreams and manipulate them, but I normally help people work out what's in their subconscious, but some people are harder to figure out than others," he gives Todoroki a pointed look.

"Guilty as charged," Todoroki deadpans. "But how did you find me?"

"Ah, well, I'm still in training. My range of focus isn't great, and sometimes at night, I just slip into other people's dreams. Not on purpose, of course! I'd never want to invade your privacy or anything—"

"Why did you leave?" Todoroki doesn't mean for it to sound accusatory. He really doesn't. He just isn't completely sure how he feels about this boy helping him through his own subconscious struggles and just—leaving. It makes him feel hollow in a way he hasn't in years.

He smiles ruefully. "My quirk has limits. Talking—"

"Breaks the dream," Todoroki muses. It's a reassuring revelation. "And you solved my problem, so there was no reason for you to come back."

"No!" the boy squeaks. "Not that there wasn't a reason! I just don't know how to wield my power yet. It's not that I would have come back—they're your dreams—I wouldn't want to intrude—they're your dreams, after all—"

Todoroki cuts him off, awe still radiating off his words, if not fondness, as well. After all, they'd gone through hell together. "You never did tell me your name."

"Midoriya!" the boy says, out of breath from his previous rambling, but joyous all the same. "Izuku Midoriya."

He smiles warmly, offering his open palm to Midoriya's rough, scarred hand. "Todoroki Shouto."

Todoroki clasps Midoriya's hand tightly and squeezes it and lets out a breath he feels like he's been holding his entire life. "It's nice to finally meet you."


End file.
